Sunday, October 18, 2015

Mark Edmundson teaches English literature at the University
of Virginia. As a part of his duties he teaches a course in great philosophers
and great religious teachers. He tells us that the course comprises works by
Plato, Homer, the New Testament, Confucius, Buddha and Shakespeare.

One applauds the fact that students are being exposed to
great minds and influential thinkers. One would be happier if Edmundson was not
using the course to seduce students into embracing leftist thinking. And one
would be much happier if he did not present Plato as the last word in ethics.

After all, the Greek word for ethics derives from the word
that means “character.” Ethics is about building character, not embracing an
Ideal.

Since the greatest ethical thinker of antiquity was
Aristotle, not Plato, it is somewhat surprising to see that Edmundson is
selling Platonic idealism as an ethical system that shows the way to human happiness.
Surely, Plato had ideas about happiness, but, as the Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy explains, Aristotle wrote the book on ethics.

The Encyclopedia explains:

Plato's
Republic, for example, does not
treat ethics as a distinct subject matter; nor does it offer a systematic
examination of the nature of happiness, virtue, voluntariness, pleasure, or
friendship. To be sure, we can find in Plato's works important discussions of
these phenomena, but they are not brought together and unified as they are in
Aristotle's ethical writings.

Whereas Plato’s thinking has served as the foundation of
Western idealism, Aristotle’s philosophy has grounded Western empiricism and
pragmatism. Plato was about ideas. Aristotle was about facts. Socratic
dialogues begin with an idea and end with an idea. It followed that, for Plato,
human beings could only achieve happiness by giving their lives for an ideal.
Aristotle thought more deeply about happiness. He defined it in terms of
excellence: as doing a job well for the sake of doing it well. Where Plato
veered toward belief and conviction, Aristotle emphasized action in the world.

The Encyclopedia offers Aristotle’s view:

He
says, not that happiness is virtue, but that it is virtuous activity. Living well consists in
doing something, not just being in a certain state or condition. It consists in
those lifelong activities that actualize the virtues of the rational part of
the soul.

Let’s be clear about what this means. A pianist achieves
happiness by playing the piano well, because there is a special joy in
excelling at playing the piano. His happiness does not come from getting paid
to do so or from the fame and adulation he receives. If he focuses on the latter his playing will suffer.

Platonism leads people on a different path. It does so by
using various kinds of sophistries, among them false dichotomies. When
Edmundson presents Plato’s ethics he does not mention Aristotle, but compares
the Platonic view to a materialist, consumerist vision. He asks why people who
have so much, have so many goods, who enjoy the benefits of modern
communication and transportation are not happy?

Apparently, Edmundson wants to connect with his Freshman
students, because he channels the wisdom of someone called Louis C.K., who is
not one of the great philosophers or religious leaders. Apparently, Louis said
that no one is happy. It’s what you would expect from someone who is
never going to belong to the pantheon of great minds.

On its face, the statement is nonsense. Some people are
unhappy and some are happy. It is absurd to say that everyone is the one or the
other. Thus, the dichotomy that Edmundson is using to seduce the minds of his
young students is false.

But once he establishes it, Edmundson can answer that people
are unhappy because they are too involved with material things, to the
exclusion of what he and some people call meaning. Of course, this makes happiness
something like a mental state, one that involves how you feel about other
people and what you believe. It is no longer about how you do or
do not behave in the world, or whether or not you are good at anything.

Obviously, Aristotle was responding to Plato when he defined
happiness in terms of good character and doing the right thing for the sake of
doing the right thing. Thinking and doing are not the same. We note that doing
the right thing because we want to help other people, as in giving charity, is
really not what Aristotle was talking about.

Yet, Edmundson, marrying Plato to the Christian virtue of
compassion, is selling that sentiment. One notes in passing that no less a
theologian than Augustine had long since declared Plato to be a “near
Christian.”

Effectively, Edmundson is teaching
his students to be liberals and progressives. In this passage he describes
Plato’s view:

Plato
believed that the best of all lives were based upon a quest, and an arduous
quest at that. People who sought the Truth were the ones who, to Plato, lived
with the most intensity and even joy. They cared nothing, or very little, for
the trappings of successful life: They would be inclined to sneer at our
gizmos, except as they were means to an end. The end? The discovery of what is
actually the case. Contact with the real!

This might very well appeal to college students, but we
emphasize that for Plato the realm of the real is the realm of the Forms and
Ideas. His theory induces people to try not to excel in the world, the better
to salve their low self-esteem by thinking that they are right, that they
think like all of the other students think.

As for reality, in the sense of empirical data and concrete
objects, Plato did not believe that we ever make contact with them. What we
consider to be real objects, he said, were mere appearances, images reflected on
the wall of a cave.

In Platonic terms, the Truth does not mean true to the
facts; it does not mean true to experience. Truth means thinking what Plato and
Socrates want you to think. Plato does not lay down rules for living your life
well and successfully; he does not care whether you excel or not. His is not a
guide to life. It does not teach as much as it seduces the minds of those who
are young and gullible. It is about mind control.

According to Edmundson, Plato was interested in finding the
one Truth that applied to all people at all times and in all places. Good luck
with that.

And yet, the promised transcendence is supposed to trump all
that is required of you when you belong to a specific community, when you go out
and master a trade, when you build a home and care for a family. Platonism cuts
you off from your community and turns you into a citizen of the world. This
makes you dysfunctional except to the extent that you can be compassionate
toward the poor and support leftist causes.

As Edmundson enthuses:

The
quest for Truth is an ideal. When men and women engage it, their days are alive
with meaning and intensity. They know what they are doing on Earth. They know
what they want. They don’t need everything to be amazing. They know that
happiness comes from picking out a noble goal, an ideal, and dedicating
themselves to it.

When you have detached yourself from reality, you will be
chasing down an Ideal and you will never return to reality. Your
passionate intensity, your conviction that you are right will be so strong that
you will never allow a mere fact to cast doubt on it. If you allow yourself to
doubt you will be moving toward the empirical or scientific method, and that is precluded by Platonism. Your quest for an ideal is designed to blind you to
the facts.

One must note an interesting point, namely that Plato trotted
out the example of warriors in his perfect state who were fighting for an
ideal, for their idea of honor.

Edmundson explains:

Plato
admires those who quest to be martial heroes, though not as much as he admires
aspiring thinkers. Plato understands how the best of warriors fight not for
material wealth or for conquest, but to defend their families and their nations
and to live up to the code of honor. Homer’s warriors, who fully embody the
heroic ideal, are often afraid of nothing.

One might question whether a warrior can be afraid of nothing. Plato is obviously trafficking in caricatures.

Warriors do live up to a code of honor. The code of honor is
not an ideal, but a set of specific behaviors that constitute the activity of
being a warrior. From Aristotle’s perspective warriors try to excel at what they
do. If your mind is distracted by your family back home you will be a less effective
warrior. If your mind is troubled by the injuries you want to inflict on the
enemies you will not be a very effective warrior.

And one must also notice that in most wars there are winners
and losers. Aristotle places more value on negotiation, on the
ability to compromise, to find common ground, to discover the mean between two
extreme positions and to make deals.

Edmundson shifts focus to the notion that he calls
compassion. He might be thinking of Christian love, agape or charity, but he
might also be thinking of benevolence and magnanimity, which are not really the
same thing. There is a fundamental difference between giving charity and giving a job.

He explains compassion by invoking the good Samaritan:

A man
is beaten and robbed and left on the roadside. Members of his own group pass
him by, leaving him to suffer. But a Samaritan comes along and lifts the
afflicted man from the side of the road. He binds the man’s wounds and mounts
him on his own beast. He takes the sufferer to an inn and pays his bill and
says that he will return to visit and also to settle accounts. Then the
teacher’s question: “Who truly was a neighbor to the unfortunate man?”

Every
man is my neighbor. Every woman is my neighbor. This is the central teaching of
Jesus, and though it is not an easy teaching to put into practice, it may
confer upon living men and women a sense of wholeness, full being in the
present, and even joy. It will almost certainly provide what the world of fast
travel and fine food and electronic gizmos will not: It will
provide meaning.

One assumes that this is presented as a rationale for
Obamacare. But, there is a very large difference between having a heart filled
with compassion and inventing and purchasing the gizmos that can treat the man who has been beaten and left by the roadside. Western civilization underwent
a major transformation when it decided to dispense with the notion that meaning (or ideas or a state of mind) could cure, and that it was better to have hospitals and antibiotics. (True enough, a good state of mind helps, but it does not take the place of medicine.) Moreover,
the more the trauma surgeon feels compassion for his patient, the less
effective he will be as a trauma surgeon. Physicians know that it is best to be
able to put aside the fact that they are treating someone’s nephew or husband.
This is why they do not, as a rule, treat family members.

I am not going to tell you what does or does not constitute
the teaching of Jesus. I will simply mention that to make every man and woman
your neighbor can easily lead you to believe that that you are responsible for
everyone who is walking on the planet. It is part of a doctrine that the Obama
administration trots out as a rationale for getting involved in some conflicts
and not others.

As for filling your heart with joy and meaning, I think it
far better to consider the happiness that accrues to the emergency room physician
who does a great job healing the trauma victim because he is happy to do excel
at what he does. He is happy to work on the trauma patient even though he knows
that it is a practical impossibility for him to do the same thing at the same
time for every man and woman and child on the planet.

Plato was trafficking a grand illusion. It has not yet
finished doing damage to the minds of the young.

2 comments:

It appears easy to get confused when talking about abstract ideals, although it probably doesn't help to start with a provocative title like "If Everything Is So Amazing, Why’s Nobody Happy?"

E.F. Schumacher's work suggests a starting point is to recognize the "great chain of being", most specifically as a progression down from the gods to angels to man to animals to plants and finally dead minerals at the bottom. So according to Wikipedia Plato and Aristotle worked with this concept. And basically that humans inhabited some middle realm, somewhere between the unlimited spiritual beings and the lowly dumb animals that are forced to only kill and scavenge for their survival.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being------------The great chain of being is a strict, religious hierarchical structure of all matter and life, believed to have been decreed by God. The chain starts from God and progresses downward to angels, demons (fallen/renegade angels), stars, moon, kings, princes, nobles, commoners, wild animals, domesticated animals, trees, other plants, precious stones, precious metals, and other minerals.

The great chain of being is a concept derived from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Proclus. Further developed during the Middle Ages, it reached full expression in early modern Neoplatonism.----------------

In contrast modern scientific materialism (or scientism) easily overpowers such a framework, dismissing a vertical dimension, and calling humans mere naked apes, just more capable animals who have no purpose beyond survival and whatever pleasures we can find.

Schumacher said this chain of being was useful because each level in the chain had different needs, and sees human development as dependent upon the lower levels, but that our happiness depends on moving attention more towards the higher levels as we mature.

I find it a comforting thought, primarily because it helps explain why people so often see things differently, and find different strategies to meeting their needs, and then you might even say "unhappiness" is not a sign of failure, but a prompting from something hidden inside of you that also needs attention. And it makes sense that things like materialism are about the lowest levels of happiness, while when those needs are satisified, other more subtle needs will arise, and won't have as simple answers, and require awareness of "invisible things" that we can't quite touch like physical objects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Guide_for_the_Perplexed#Implications--------Schumacher argues that by removing the vertical dimension from the universe and the qualitative distinctions of 'higher' and 'lower' qualities which go with it, materialistic scientism can in the societal sphere only lead to moral relativism and utilitarianism. While in the personal sphere, answering the question 'What do I do with my life?' leaves us with only two answers: selfishness and utilitarianism.

In contrast, he argues that appreciating the different levels of being provides a simple, but clear morality. The traditional view, as Schumacher says, has always been that the proper goal of humanity is "...to move higher, to develop one's highest faculties, to gain knowledge of the higher and highest things, and, if possible, to 'see God'. If one moves lower, develops only one's lower faculties, which we share with the animals, then one makes onesself deeply unhappy, even to the point of despair." This is a view, Schumacher says, which is shared by all the major religions. Many things, Schumacher says, while true at a lower level, become absurd at a higher level, and vice versa.

Schumacher does not claim there is any scientific evidence for a level of being above self-consciousness, contenting himself with the observation that this has been the universal conviction of all major religions.----------------